Chapter 1: The Soul of Sparta

Abstract An Acropolis in China: Modern China and Ancient Greece is a study of modern Chinese thought, literature, and culture in the global context. The history of Chinese writers’ literary practices and intellectual inquisitions represents their continuous responses to and reflections on the tremendous changes that China went through in the twentieth century. From the unique angle of ancient Greek civilization’s influence on modern China, this book explores how these responses and reflections were prompted and rendered in the reception, reformulation, and repurposing of Greek philosophical and literary visions. From the early twentieth century on, China’s aspiring minds not only appropriated Greek antiquity and intertwined its images with the fabric of modern Chinese literature and discourse; they also employed the Greek elements in measuring their modern European or Japanese counterparts, buttressing the latter’s popularity among Chinese readers. This is, therefore, a study not of Chinese Hellenism or Hellenization—a new extension of the transmission of the Greek culture—but rather of the emergence of the new cultural paradigms in modern China by reinventing the Hellenism against the domestic context. This book aims to uncover the sophisticated transcultural dialogues through which the appropriated Greek elements were anchored in China’s circumstances and their borrowers’ life experiences, and in turn veered the new intellectual trends that characterized modern Chinese literature and culture.